The Oxford Dictionary made its selection for the 2024 Word of the Year. In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s ‘brain rot.’
Are you experiencing brain rot these days? If so, you find yourself in a trend that a major dictionary noticed. The Oxford University Press named brain rot as its 2024 Word of the Year.
What does it take for a word to receive such an honor? It depends. Sometimes, a word receives the honor based on search results at a dictionary’s website. The more times people search for the word, the better the chance it’ll earn the “word of the year” designation. For Oxford, the honor followed a public vote. More than 37,000 people had their say and that’s the best they could apparently come up with.
Cause or effect? Or both?
Oxford reports Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden had the first recorded use of the word. Back then, in 1854, he used the phrase to describe the effect of an overly simple lifestyle:
As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Nowadays, while that meaning is still around, brain rot is also used to describe the cause as well. Specifically, it refers to the lowbrow content you’ll find on a lot of social media. The low-hanging mental fruit that populates much of the pages of accounts.
Spend a half-hour on YouTube or TikTok and watch the mindless videos that tell you nothing at all while only moderately entertaining you. That stuff, by the modern defintion, could be considered “brain rot.” Consuming too much of it could cause the rotting of your intellect.
The phrase “speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said. “I find it fascinating that the term ‘brain rot’ has been adopted by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, those communities largely responsible for the use and creation of the digital content the term refers to. These communities have amplified the expression through social media channels, the very place said to cause ‘brain rot’. It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.”
Inherited and, unfortunately, seem to be content to maintain.
